The desperation would be laughable, but it's not funny to write "How Adam Lanza Wrecked Obama's Second Term."

20 children were murdered, and 6 adults. Leave it alone. Conduct your pathetic search for someone or something to blame somewhere else, Alex Seitz-Wald. Have some decency. Find another grave upon which to dance the Dance of Obama Exculpation. 

"It was satisfying to hear his screams. Mamma mia how he screamed!"

"In the end I didn't see anything... nothing remained!"

A friend "remembers occasionally going to watch a movie with [Adam] Lanza after a dance marathon and chatting with him about current events and chimpanzees."

The inane/absurd search for meaning in the mind of a lost and now-hated soul.

10 rules for writing about the 50th anniversary of the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

It's coming up next Friday, and I'd like to help with that op-ed or blog post you might have in the works.

1. Don't repeat the cliché that everyone who was around at the time remembers where he was and what he was doing when he heard the news.

2. Don't tell us — especially don't tell us as if it were not a big cliché — what you happened to have been doing and how you've always remembered that. After 50 years, can you not finally see that it doesn't matter?

3. Don't even attempt to say that the assassination had a profound effect on people. There is no new way to say that. We know!

4. Don't make up alternate histories of what would have happened if Kennedy had not been killed. Everything would have been different; we would all have been different. If you're American and under 50, you can assume that you would never have been born.

5.  Don't recount the conspiracy theories. Here's Wikipedia's article on the subject. If you're into that sort of thing, enjoy it some day in your spare time, but don't lard your 50th anniversary writings with that. It's tawdry and undignified, and we've heard it all a thousand times. And by "all," I don't really mean all. What's the one about the Federal Reserve? I just mean, if that's what you've found to talk about, just shut up.

6. Don't connect the story of JFK to Obama. I know it seems as though everything is about Obama, but resist. It's cheap and inappropriate.

7. Don't tell us about other Kennedys. Don't drag in the recent news that Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg's son Jack appears to have reached adulthood in nonugly form and has grown a large head of hair and is therefore presumptive presidential material. That's annoying and off-topic.

8. Don't commemorate murder. A man managed to kill the President. He's already gotten far too much press. He doesn't deserve our endless attention. I'm sick of "celebrating" a death day. We don't make anything of Lincoln's death day. We celebrate his birthday, like Washington's, because he was such a great President. We don't celebrate JFK's birthday — I don't even know what it is — because he was not great enough. We celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday, not the day he was assassinated. Why? Because of his greatness, and because we don't want to direct our attention toward his murder. So why do we focus on Kennedy's death day? It must be because he was not great enough, and because of points #1, #2, and #3, above. It's about ourselves. A man died and we morbidly relive it annually, for some reason that must make little sense to those under 50.

9. Do write to end the annual ritual of death commemoration. Nail down the coffin lid and give the dead President some peace. Inspire us to move on to modest acknowledgements of the date at 10 or 25 year intervals up until 2063, when we — those of us who survive — can go big for the centennial.

10. Do make it — if not original — short.

"Facebook is allowing videos showing people being decapitated to be posted and shared on its site once again."

"The social network had placed a temporary ban on the material in May following complaints that the clips could cause long-term psychological damage."

The US firm now believes its users should be free to watch and condemn, but not celebrate, such videos.

How are they controlling how people react to what they see?

Facebook's terms and conditions now state that it will remove photos or videos that "glorify violence" in addition to other banned material, including a woman's "fully exposed breast."

Idiocy.

"An ultra low frequency attack is what I’ve been subject to for the last three months..."

"... and to be perfectly honest, that is what has driven me to this."

"I thought it might be better to be like a chameleon — able to adapt and change and blend with our environment rather than conquer it."

Said Ross Langdon, a Tasmanian-born architect who built "eco-lodges and socially sustainable tourism in ecologically sensitive locations." He died in the Nairobi terror attack, along with his partner Elif Yavuz, a Harvard PhD and malaria specialist, who worked for the Clinton foundation.

"Elif was brilliant at her job and a joy to work with.... She was a friend both in and out of the office, and always had a great sense of humor – recently, her baby belly had been the subject of a number of jokes."

ADDED: Many pictures of this couple here.

"Some witnesses said the gunmen had told Muslims to leave and said non-Muslims would be targeted."

BBC reports on the massacre in the upscale shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya:

"They came and said: 'If you are Muslim, stand up. We've come to rescue you," said Elijah Lamau.

He said the Muslims left with their hands up, and then the gunmen shot two people.

The correspondent in Nairobi for the Economist, Daniel Howden told the BBC he spoke to one man with a Christian first name but a Muslim-sounding surname who managed to escape the attackers by putting his thumb over his first name on his ID.

"A Florida woman who became famous for her uncontrollable hiccupping has been found guilty of first-degree murder."

"Under Florida law, someone who participates in a robbery that leads to a death can still be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole."

Earlier this week, the court heard a recording of the phone conversation she had with her mother hours after her arrest.

'I didn't kill nobody,' Mee said. '…I set everything up. It all went wrong, Mom. It [expletive] just went downhill after everything happened, Mom.'

"One of the first teams of heavily armed police to respond to Monday's shooting in Washington DC was ordered to stand down by superiors."

BBC reports.

For the annals of religion and violence: Did Buddhism inspire Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter?

WaPo has an article with the headline "Buddist community ponders apparent link between their faith and Navy Yard shooter." (Ponder that egregious spelling error.)

“As Buddhism has spread in the West, it has put forth and maintained an image of being a peaceful religion,” Buddhist ethicist Justin Whitaker, author of the American Buddhist Perspective blog, wrote Tuesday. “This is a myth.”

Buddhism can seem particularly appealing to “mentally unbalanced people seeking to right the ship of their lives, to self-medicate, to curb their impulses, or to give them a firmer grip on reality,” Clark Strand, a contributing editor to the Buddhist publication Tricycle magazine and a former Zen monk, said in an interview....

Are there particular issues for people who delve deeply into meditation but may not have a strong or well-developed connection to Buddhism’s history and theology?

“Meditation alone may have no effect whatsoever on one’s morals and hence overall life,” Whitaker wrote in the blog post. “And it might also, as many people find out early in the process, actually open up deeper layers of pain, anger, and guilt that have been effectively repressed.”

What Whitaker and Strand are not saying is that meditation could exacerbate the problems of someone with mental illness. We're talking about sitting silently within one's own mind, cutting off interaction with others and connections to the concrete world. If that meditating mind is irrational and disordered, why would the result be "a firmer grip on reality"?

"Naval Yard Gunman Is Said to Have Had Mental Ills for a Decade."

"[Aaron] Alexis, according to a report filed by an officer with the Newport Police Department in Rhode Island, was suffering from hallucinations so serious that he had called the police last month, a police official said."

Mr. Alexis told them that he had gotten into an argument with someone at an airport in Virginia. He said the person he had argued with “had sent three people to follow him and to keep him awake by talking to him and sending vibrations to his body” via a microwave machine, according to the police report.

Mr. Alexis had moved to three different hotels in a single night to elude strange voices and people he believed were sending the microwave vibrations. At a hotel at a nearby naval base, Mr. Alexis told the police that he had heard “voices speaking to him through the wall, flooring and ceiling,” Lt. Fitzgerald said.

ADDED: My God, can't we help these people? Even if only for the sake of their potential victims, we should help them, but aside from that: Help them!

"Matthew Shepard's murder in 1998 became a symbol of hate crime that helped to drive anti-hate crime legislation.'

"But 'what if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard’s murder was wrong?'"

IN THE COMMENTS: n.n linked to an item from 2004, "New Details Emerge in Matthew Shepard Murder," which was about an episode of "20/20," which I see that I blogged about this material at the time and said:

Justice demands that we think clearly about criminal responsibility and not let our minds be clouded by evocative stories that mesh with our assumptions about the world and our social policy aspirations. I believe the cause of gay rights is a very good one, and I also think that if the cause is good, truth should serve it. If you think your cause is so important that you must put it ahead of the truth, you are deeply confused.

Then I watched the episode "20/20" and thought it was a murky collection of "interviews with people who had plenty of reason to lie."

Now that the public's strong reaction to the original "gay panic" story is known, the two murderers have every motivation to say it wasn't like that at all. And the people of Laramie can't appreciate having their town associated with bigotry, so they too have a motivation to retell the story. I have no idea what is true here. Since the men weren't convicted of a "hate crime" and, in any event, they pleaded guilty, their convictions are sound whether their motivation was robbery or bigotry.

I haven't looked into the new articles enough to know how much more there is, but Andrew Sullivan is interviewing the author of what is a new book, "The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard."

"Researchers long viewed infanticide and similar acts of maternal skulduggery as pathological, a result of the mother's being under extreme stress..."

".... it made little genetic sense for a mother to destroy her young, and maternal nurturing was assumed to be a hard-wired affair. More recently, scientists have accrued abundant evidence that 'bad' mothering is common in nature and that it is often a centerpiece of the reproductive game plan... [P]andas, for example, often practice  'a postnatal form of family planning, giving birth to what may be thought of as an heir and a spare, and then, when the heir fares well, walking away from the spare with nary a fare-thee-well.'"

From a CSM article titled "Baby elephant cries for 5 hours. Is Mom rejection unusual?"

"This case definitely falls in the rarest of rare categories and warrants the exemplary punishment of death."

Said the judge, in India. 

Earlier, protesters outside the court had demanded that the four men should be hanged.

As they were escorted to the courtroom, the four men shouted to the crowd: "Brothers, save us!"

"But dead serious if u don't hear from me at all again tonight, something happened."

Text message sent to a friend by a woman accused of second degree murder, whose husband died in a fall off a cliff in Glacier National Park. Jordan Linn Graham had been married to Cody L. Johnson for about a week.

Graham told police that her husband grabbed her by the arm. She turned and removed it.

"Graham stated she could have just walked away, but due to her anger, she pushed Johnson with both hands in the back and as a result, he fell face first off the cliff," the complaint read.

Who goes walking along a deadly precipice next to someone with whom they have a hot dispute?

"A Texas father who discovered a man raping his five-year-old daughter and beat him to death with his bare hands will not be charged with homicide under state law."

"Under Texas state law, deadly force is authorized and indeed, justified in order to stop an aggravated sexual assault and coupled with the fact that the harrowing 911 calls made by the father back claims he even tried to save the pedophile's life led to the grand jury's decision."

The Nevada Supreme Court upholds letting the defendant's rap song "Drug Deala" in as evidence in a murder trial.

Deyundrea Orlando Holmes wrote the song in jail and included lyrics about the details of the crime.

Part of the lyrics read, "I catching slipping at the club and jack you for your necklace." In gangsta parlance, "jacking" is slang for robbery. The lyrics also referenced, "I'm parking lot jacking, running through our pockets with uh ski mask on straight laughing."

Witnesses said [Kevin "Mo"] Nelson, a known drug dealer, was lured to the recording studio by Holmes and others on the pretense of a methamphetamine sale. Two men wearing ski masks and black clothes, later identified as Holmes and another man named Max Reed, accosted Nelson and his friend Kenny Clark, in the parking lot, according to court documents. During the struggle, Nelson's shirt and chain necklace were torn off and his pockets turned inside out....

The trial judge told the jury they could take these lyrics as "confessions, admissions or neither" and that they could not be used as evidence of the defendant's bad character or propensity to commit crimes. The court recognized rap lyrics may exaggerate or refer in the first person to things the rapper hasn't actually done, but that doesn't "exempt such writings from jury consideration where, as here, the lyrics describe details that mirror the crime charged."

How dumb was Holmes to write these lyrics in jail after he was arrested for murder? There's so much talk about how rappers are only playing characters and telling stories, but how obtuse do you need to be to imagine that you can immunize your confessions and admissions by putting them in rap form?

"You know, it's hard to die. It takes a long time, and it's not easy to get killed."

A Rush Limbaugh pronouncement, made the other day, that's stuck with me. I like it out of context, but here's the context:

People in this country have been so bombarded with "This is gonna kill you and that's gonna make you sick," or "this genetic trait's gonna kill you" or whatever, the people of this country have been so bombarded with the fact that they're gonna die tomorrow that they think the only way to stay alive is to have health insurance.

This has been one of the biggest scams that's ever been perpetrated on the people of this country.  I am not kidding you.  I honestly believe this.  Now, I know some of you are shouting, "Hey, Rush, don't downplay this.  Health is a big thing."  I know it is, but, you know, it's hard to die.  It takes a long time, and it's not easy to get killed.  When it happens, those are rare criminal examples, but they're not the result of lifestyle choices.  There's no insurance policy -- go talk to this poor kid in Duncan, Oklahoma.  There's not one insurance plan he could have had that would have kept him alive because the culture killed him.  And the same thing with Shorty.

It's hard to die... but the culture killed him.

The conservatives' high ground on race is colorblindness, and they'd be fools to abandon it.

That's a general piece of advice I'd like to deliver, prompted by this specific headline, seen just now at Twitchy:

Slain World War II vet Delbert Belton honored at candlelight vigil [photos]

I know there are those who think there's a need to rebalance public opinion after the distortions that surrounded the George Zimmerman case, which skewed racial discourse in this country over the past year, but it's a terrible idea to go looking for incidents in where the killers are black and the victims are white and to exploit them in what seems like an effort to undo the distortions. I saw this happening earlier this week over the Christopher Lane murder, I labeled it "counter-Trayvonistic," which was a too-subtle way to say: Don't fight skewing with skewing in the opposite direction.

Conservatives have rested on the principle of colorblindness for a long time, and they've taken abuse for it. Look at how left liberals abuse Chief Justice Roberts for writing, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." They consider that kind of talk naive (at best). They push the perceived sophistication of what Justice Blackmun said back in the first affirmative action case: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."

Those are the 2 well-defined and socially presentable opinions in this country, and decent, sincere Americans have argued from these positions for decades. Now, we're seeing some conservatives who seem frustrated by this taking account of race that's been done on the left. They seem to think it's a good time to spotlight violence committed by black people. This is not a good idea! It's fine to mourn Shorty, but these candlelight vigils are intended to stir hearts the way hearts were stirred at the Trayvon Martin demonstrations.

Trayvon Martin — an individual human being — was used by demagogues to score points about the suffering of black people in America, but this is not a game, and it is delusion to imagine that there is a need to score points on some imagined other side. This is not a game. There is no score. And we are all on the same side.

To paraphrase the Chief Justice: The way to stop skewing public opinion based on race is to stop skewing public opinion based on race.

To stir hearts counter-Trayvonistically is to nurture feelings that white people are oppressed by black people. This alternative to colorblindness is profoundly stupid. 1. It abandons the easy to express, principled position that many people perceive as the high ground. 2. It steps into the arena of taking account of race, where the left liberals would love to take you on. And 3. It gives air to the white supremacists among us. These people have been outcasts for a long time, but they exist, perhaps not quite yet recognizing what they are.

What sparks catch fire in that candlelight vigil for Shorty?